I blinked and it's March. That's not entirely true, January was 100 years long, then February showed up, and at least here in Central Texas, that meant it was harshly cold for like 48 hours and now it's summer. "That's false Spring!" No... we don't have Spring here.
Anyway, it's March and you might be asking yourself what you should actually be doing this year now that the year is rolling onward. You may have yearly or quarterly goals or metrics, but what are your personal development goals? And do you already feel behind?
You may be asking yourself what you want to actually do this year. What do you want to learn? What skills do you want to level up? Never fear, let me provide you with my opinionated list of some of the tactics I recommend for navigating this.
Use AI and have opinions about popular AI tools
I want to be very clear that I don't think AI is appropriate everywhere, but I do think if you are in tech you need to have some kind of personal narrative around AI, particularly related to your role. Where you use it, why, and how.
Someone recently asked if I would let AI write blogs for me, and the answer is no, I barely let any tools spell and grammar check my blogs. I'm sure you can tell. Voice and style aside, which I'm aware an AI can "learn", I find writing very cathartic and if someone else reads and enjoys it, that's a bonus. I have no reason to give that up, but also, where am I going to put this chaotic, GIF-filled corporate rage?
I digress.
Claude for summarizing, brainstorming, and ideation
I use Claude for summarizing written content for things like video scripts. My prompts are dead simple:
Turn this blog into a 2-3 minute video script.
Claude and I also like to collaborate on talk ideas, titles, and descriptions. This gives me a great base to either edit on my own, entirely rework, or read exactly once and close Claude's window.
Make this talk title something people would actually go to.
I also like asking for summaries on specific docs pages because I want to see a TL;DR that matches my understanding. This leads into the next use case.
Docs AI for search and knowledge checks
I use built-in docs AI for enhanced search and knowledge checks, almost like quizzes in academy courses. Those implementations will heavily depend on the model, but many are good about citing their sources if I feel like I need to fact check.
If there is both a search and a docs AI, I like to see what results come up when I search or ask a question with similar terms. This is helpful to see and work to improve the UX and "findability" within docs. If search and docs AI are generating different results, or worse, they are not finding what they should, you need to spend some time to fix it before your users get stuck.
Copilots
I'm mostly only working on small code bases and demos these days, so I can use Kestra's Copilot or Visual Studio Code's Copilot, something specific to a single file or repo, and this works really well for me. I know some people have other AI agents deep in their organization's tooling, but I don't really need that right now.
All of this comes back to my experience with AI and my opinions I've developed around it. These options may not work for you, but I would strongly encourage you to develop your own experience and opinions, particularly because it will come up in my next "skill": interviewing.
Never stop interviewing
This one hurts to type because interviewing is hard, even in the most pleasant interview cycles and job markets. It can evoke a lot of negative feelings and, depending on who you talk to about it, might make it seem like you are looking for your next opportunity. How you feel after that interview, whether you are truly job seeking or not, can be largely dependent on the interviewer.
The idea with this one is you "never stop interviewing" so you never lose the skills to interview. You are able to talk about your experience, skills, delivery, and value outside of a yearly or bi-yearly performance review to someone who knows nothing other than maybe what you put on the application and in your resume.
I heard this one very early on in my career from someone quite senior, and then I heard it reinforced by people in other areas of the org chart. They were clear that they weren't necessarily looking for another position, but they wanted to know what was out there and they wanted to keep these interview skills honed.
It's also a great reality check to see if you need to do a hard pivot of some kind. Sometimes titles change or roles evolve and you need to be flexible enough to adjust. Interviewing helps you understand what people outside of your current organization are looking for.
Keep your resume updated
I like to visit my resume at least twice a year, typically aligned either with a performance review or the end of the year. What you are trying to avoid is a situation where you need an updated resume immediately, and you can't possibly figure out how to summarize your role on the fly.
If you can get really good at having a refined, ready-to-go resume, you should be really good at communicating your role, experience, skills, delivery, value, etc. and interviewing (and performance reviews!) become easier too.
Find your community, online and offline
I started going to bookstore events last year. I had started reading romance novels for the predictability and comfort that comes with a happily ever after (HEA) or happy for now (HFN). And at some point I realized one of my favorite authors was local and I could actually go see her. And surround myself with people who also thought she and her books were pretty cool too. Not only do these events immediately feel like safe spaces, they remind me that even though I've spent an entire career working mostly with men, there are communities that are almost entirely not-men out there too.
And it's all about finding balance. Like balancing a stack of books on the way to the cash register when you just came for one. Oopsies!
More and more community spaces and groups seem to be seeing a post-pandemic-shutdown renaissance. I don't know exactly what's driving that, but I know I'm finding more energy to even get out to tech meetups again. Maybe people are craving those connections again? This makes it a great time to join and explore communities with others doing the exact same thing.
Geek out on something
I like birds.
This is not new, this is a life long... hobby...? Birds + AI are apparently a thing this year, with CES summoning AI-powered bird identifying tools. So I acquired some new tech and apps to live my best bird nerd life this year.
Birds aren't your thing? Find something to go deep into. I'm also big into nail polish and stained glass (copper foil & lead came). Those aren't even close to tech adjacent, but they give me an opportunity to "touch grass" away from a computer.
So, what's the plan?
Maybe this wasn't quite the list you were expecting, but I hope it gets you thinking. What is on your list for doing and learning this year? Have you started? There is still so much year left.
Top comments (6)
The main focus for this year is interacting on Dev.to and practice my interviewing skills. I notice that I am on track on the developer side, but am bad at articulating my thoughts in the interview phase. I am hoping to improve my communication skills in terms of interviewing and hope for the best!
Overall, great post! Thanks for sharing :D
This is great! Thanks for sharing! You got this :)
I try to understand the wasm byte format to able write a wasm code like coding assembler 30+years ago. This journey lead me to create a text representation of wasm different than a WAT. For this process is arguing to AI is help a lot.
Thanks for the prompt! My main focus this year is optimizing my AI-accelerated workflows, but also not losing sight of the big picture. That's why I'm also taking a deep dive into distributed systems. And I'm learning in public! dev.to/abustamam/series/36007 (apologies if posting a link is inappropriate; please let me know if you'd like me to delete). Through this I want to build my brand as an expert in "classical engineering" (web development, distributed systems) but also "new engineering" (AI-accelerated workflows etc).
I agree with you -- writing is cathartic. That said, I do admit that I use AI to help me synthesize information, outline my blog posts, etc. But I feel like AI will never have my voice. I piped one of my blog posts into Chat GPT once and it was like "this is not professional" and I'm just like, well I'd rather be me than be professional! Besides, while AI overuses em-dashes, I overuse semicolons and parentheses.
My dad loves birds; when we walk together the few times a year I see him, he's always able to identify birds based on their warbles, time of day/year, migration patterns, etc. I bought him an AI birdhouse for his birthday a few years ago. I don't know if he uses it though; I don't know why he would when his intuition is a lot better than AI right now!
But I picked piano back up after 20 years having not played; I'm not as good as I was before and most of the time when I practice I have a baby in one arm, but it's still a fun hobby and it's one of the few things besides milk that can calm the little one!
Great post! Thanks for sharing.
Same! Professional can be too stuffy and boring. I also love a good use of semicolons, although I use them less after working for non-American companies.
Thanks for sharing! Good luck with your deep dive and learning in public.
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